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I’ll share one that shows the folly of youth and why we need new ideas. Sometimes you must accept the fact that your ideas won’t be accepted by the rest of the group. It involves the MIT Folding Endurance Test; I was involved with that very early on. The result of the testing in laboratories can be very erratic, because of the nature of the test. It lacks consistency both in the laboratory or in between laboratories. Being a young person with bright ideas and full of new ways of looking at things, I looked at the variation there and decided it would be much better if we reported the results as the law of arrhythmic value of the folding endurance; especially for samples that were above a certain value. However, when you do that it becomes a very nice linear test where you’re able to make the results that come from that testing process look a whole lot more conventional to those technicians. It turns out that no one shared the view that it would be a good idea to move that test for the sole reason of making the statistics. There were certainly things like existing SOPs, existing methods, existing specifications, and government requirements that did not enter my young brain at that point.

This is a situation where I brought a new idea to the table and I was told that it’s probably not the right direction for the industry to proceed. It was a learning experience, because it showed the value of looking at things from many different viewpoints and not strictly a technical viewpoint (If you must make the method comprehensible to the actual users). It’s a lesson I carried with me.

TAPPI Methods are wonderful. They are very specific; and they give you a single answer, but we don’t want to overwhelm the audience with technical jargons and requirements that aren’t essential to the method.

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